The twelve episodes, each directed by different individuals, use a variety of viewpoints and themes, while sequentially covering the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. Lane Smith portrays Emmett Seaborn, a seasoned reporter for a fictional television network who covers the U.S. space program from its earliest days, providing continuity for most of the episodes.

Portrays the Apollo program's recovery to manned flight after the Apollo 1 tragedy, from the perspective of a fictional documentary team covering the flight of Apollo 7. This flight is commanded by strong-willed Mercury veteran Wally Schirra, who is focused on safety after the death of his colleague Grissom. Pad Leader Guenter Wendt, another zealous guardian of astronaut safety, is featured by the documentary team.

Depicts Apollo 8's historic first manned lunar flight, as the redemption of an otherwise strife-torn year filled with political assassinations, war, and unrest. Documentary footage of the turbulent political events are interspersed with the drama, which is mostly filmed in black and white except for scenes aboard the spacecraft and some color newsreel footage. The fears of mission commander Frank Borman's wife Susan of the possibility of her husband dying in a spacecraft trapped in lunar orbit are highlighted. Includes the Apollo 8 Genesis reading.

Returns to 1961, and NASA engineer John Houbolt's lonely fight to convince management that the easiest way to land men on the Moon will be to use a separate landing craft. It then traces the design and development of the Lunar Module by a team led by Grumman engineer Tom Kelly. Covers the selection and training of the first crew to fly it, Jim McDivitt and Rusty Schweickart (along with Command Module pilot David Scott), and culminates with their first flight of Spider in Earth orbit on Apollo 9. The Apollo 10 lunar "dress rehearsal" is briefly mentioned.

A dramatization of the Apollo 11 first Moon landing in Mare Tranquilitatis ("Sea of Tranquility") is interspersed with flashback sequences of Emmett Seaborn's television interview with the crew of Neil Armstrong, Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin, and Command Module pilot Michael Collins.

The story of the Apollo 12 second lunar landing mission is told by Lunar Module Pilot Alan Bean. Bean, the last member of NASA Astronaut Group 3 to fly in space, narrates his experience with the tightly-knit, all-Navy crew commanded by Gemini veteran Pete Conrad, and accepts with humor and grace his responsibility for the failure of the first color TV camera on the lunar surface, and for almost fracturing his own skull by failing to properly secure the Command Module's TV camera before splashdown.

This episode covers the perilous flight of Apollo 13 entirely from the ground point of view; the astronauts are only heard on radio. Veteran TV spaceflight reporter Emmett Seaborn (Lane Smith) is summoned to broadcast the breaking news of the in-flight failure, as young reporter Brett Hutchings (Jay Mohr) is pulled off of sports to help with the coverage. As the crisis unfolds, Seaborn finds himself at odds with Hutchings' style of sensationalizing its impact on the astronauts' families, and criticizing NASA. Seaborn starts to feel he is being marginalized when the network decides to leave Hutchings on location in Houston, while sending him back to headquarters to provide only background coverage. The last straw falls when, after the successful recovery of the astronauts, Hutchings horns in on his traditional post-flight interview with flight controller Gene Kranz. Seaborn leaves dejectedly, not to be seen again until the flight of Apollo 17 in the final episode.

In 1964, while riding high on his fame as America's first man in space and his expected command of the first Gemini mission, Alan Shepard is suddenly struck with Ménière's disease, characterized by vertigo and nausea. Flight operations director Deke Slayton must ground him, but offers him the job of chief astronaut, effectively making Shepard Slayton's assistant as supervisor of all the astronauts. A few years later, a surgeon tries an experimental surgery which cures Shepard's symptoms, and he is returned to the flight rotation, commanding Apollo 14 in early 1971, which accomplishes Apollo 13's failed Fra Mauro landing. Shepard brings a six-iron golf club head on board, which he fastens to a soil-collecting tool handle and uses to hit a ball "for miles and miles".

Scientist astronautHarrison "Jack" Schmitt, a geologist, persuades his mentor, professor Lee Silver, to train the Apollo astronauts in selecting appropriate rock samples to collect through field experience, rather than the boring classroom lectures NASA has been using. Silver takes the four Apollo 15 prime and backup landing crew members (David Scott, James Irwin, Richard F. Gordon, Jr., and Schmitt) to the southwestern desert, while lunar geologist Farouk El-Baz trains the Command Module pilots (Alfred Worden and Vance Brand) in high-altitude recognition of geological features using airplane flights over Hawaii. Schmitt is disappointed to learn his own Apollo 18 flight will be cancelled, but he still believes the training of the other astronauts is vital. It pays off when Scott and Irwin find the "Genesis Rock", originally believed to come from the Moon's primordial crust. The title refers to Scott's reproduction of an experiment proving Galileo's hypothesis that gravity will cause bodies of differing masses to fall at the same rate in a vacuum, by dropping a hammer and a feather.

Shows the Apollo program from the point of view of the nine wives of NASA's second group of astronauts, from 1962 beyond the end of the program. The burdens placed on them include maintaining a home while presenting a positive image to the news media, shielding their husbands from any family concerns which could affect their position in the flight rotation or ability to return to Earth safely, and comforting each other in the face of tragedy as Elliot See and Ed White are killed. The episode is anchored by the Apollo 16 mission, during which recently married Ken Mattingly loses his wedding ring in the Command Module, and Lunar Module pilot Charles Duke finds it while Mattingly is performing a walk in deep space.

The story of the final lunar mission, Apollo 17, is told as a pseudo-documentary set several decades after the fact. Simulated interviews of various characters such as Emmett Seaborn and flight director Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., in old-age makeup, are included. The documentary is interspersed with the story of early French film maker Georges Méliès' creation of his vision of a trip to the Moon, the 1902 Le Voyage dans la Lune. Scenes from the original film are merged with the recreation of its filming.

The miniseries, concentrating on the Apollo space program, was produced with an intent not to repeat other dramatic portrayals of events of the space race.

Project Mercury, which was portrayed in the film The Right Stuff, was briefly summarized in the first episode. Miniseries producers Hanks, Howard and Grazer, who had previously produced Apollo 13, deliberately shot the episode We Interrupt This Program from the perspective of the media covering that flight, as the film had already covered the story from the point of view of the crew and the mission control team.

Many of the actors had opportunity to interact and form friendships with the real life astronauts they were portraying. Brett Cullen, who played Apollo 9Command Module pilot and Apollo 15 commander David Scott, was invited to the Scott family home each time an episode he appeared in was first televised. Two short clips from the final scenes of Apollo 13 were used in "That's All There Is"; a splashdown sequence, and a view of the recovery ship USS Iwo Jima (portrayed by USS New Orleans).

The original series was shot in 1.33:1 aspect ratio, intended to be viewed on standard television sets. The series was released on DVD as a 4-disc set. With the proliferation of widescreen flat-panel TV sets the series was remastered in 1.78:1 aspect ratio and re-released in 2005 as a 5-disc DVD box set. New framing causes loss of top and bottom parts of the frames from the original movie. This is not always noticeable because of careful transfer process, but in some scenes important details are lost. For example, in Disc 1, when the Gemini 8 / Agena assembly is tumbling around the sky with a stuck thruster, the thruster is not visible in the new widescreen version as it is cut off by the top of the frame. Some captions have also been compromised.[1]

Parts of the mini-series were filmed at the Disney-MGM Studios (now Disney's Hollywood Studios) in Orlando, Florida. Scenes of the moonwalks were shot inside the blimp hangars on the former Marine base in Tustin, California. Approximately half the area inside was converted to the Moon's surface, with the remainder used to hold production trailers. To simulate lunar surface gravity, weather balloons filled with helium were attached to the backs of the actors playing the astronauts in the lunar extra-vehicular activity scenes, effectively reducing their Earth-bound weights to one-sixth.

The score of "Spider" prominently features an imitation of the main title theme from the 1963 World War II movie The Great Escape, and Tom Kelly jokes about having a crew digging a tunnel out of the Grumman plant. The episode also featured a real Lunar Module (LM-13), which had been built for the Apollo 18 mission but was never used due to budget cuts. Blythe Danner, who narrated the final episode, had previously worked on location at the Johnson Space Center for the 1976 movie Futureworld, filmed in the same buildings where Apollo moonwalkers had recently trained.[2][3]